A blog about interestingness

Tag Archives: automobile

I’ve been busy lately planning for a trip next week but I came across these and thought I’d share. Conspicuous consumption meets garishly bad taste in chrome and sterling silver, respectively:

Of course, if what really revs your engine in auto luxury is that nauseous “new car” smell you might be interested to hear that it’s really just glue mixed with formaldehyde. It kills brain cells, something that may be lots of fun on a Friday night but is really bad behind the wheel. Plus it gives me a monster headache. For more about the “new car” smell and its alleged links to cancer, read this “article”:http://www.treehugger.com/files/2005/09/beware_that_new.php from TreeHugger.

Perennially for sale car company Chrysler has come up with one of the weirder marketing gimicks I’ve seen in a while. In most ways, this is a normal win-a-car auction except for one catch, the only way to qualify to enter the contest is if you have a baby born at 2:03:04 on 05/06/07. I’m not sure whether they’re trying to say that their cars are good for new families, or that they just they like a good number joke, but this is something to keep in mind if you are due to deliver sometime in the next week. Stall.

Normally reserved for high-class furniture, mahogany is an especially strong slow-growing African hardwood. No wonder it was the material of choice to make this all-wood car, the Tryane II. The three-wheeled car can reach a top speed of 101 mph and can apparently get 55-70 miles per gallon. Like many home-built cars, the Tryane II is built on the classic Citroen 2CV engine. Enjoy the picture and if you want to know more, check out “this article”:http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=451055&in_page_id=1770 from the Daily Mail newspaper.

The “X Prize Foundation”:http://xprize.org has announced a new competition to achieve automotive efficiency. Arguing that competition breeds success and citing Lindbergh’s prize-winning trans-Atlantic flight, the X Prize foundation shocked the world with the original “Ansari X Prize for space flight”:http://www.xprize.org/xprizes/ansari_x_prize.html by making space tourism a reality. Now it seems the group’s target is more terrestrial with the multi-million dollar prize going to the first group that can make a car that, among many other things, gets 100 miles per gallon. Read the full list of “guidelines”:http://auto.xprize.org/xprize/guidelines.html if you’re interested.

42 year-old Constable Nick Pointing might just be the perfect husband. His wife Carolyn has absolutely loved the story of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang for years and now thanks to four years of hard work and a lot of skill, she has one of her own. Nick and Carolyn built this road-legal (although not flight-worthy) replica of the famous flying car out of an old Land Rover.